# gage partner vaults — what the launch brings, for agents

Canonical URL: https://gage.cash/intentlaunchllm.txt
Scope: an overview of lending on gage through partner vaults: what each participant can do, what the features enable, and how the pieces work together. It describes behaviour and outcomes, not implementation.

## What gage is

gage is fixed-cost, peer-to-peer lending against tokens on Robinhood Chain, with no liquidation: nothing can touch the collateral before expiry; at expiry the borrower chooses to reclaim it or walk away. Borrowers know their full cost up front. Lenders know exactly what a loan pays if it is repaid, and what they hold if it is not.

With the launch, every loan is funded by partner vaults: pools of USDG run by independent managers, each lending by its own published rules.

## Why partner vaults

Lending against long-tail and real-world tokens needs judgement: which tokens, how much, for how long, at what price. Partner vaults let people who have that judgement put it to work, and let everyone else follow them.

- Managers turn their view of a market into a vault that lends by their rules, and earn when it does well.
- Depositors pick the judgement they trust, without having to evaluate every loan themselves.
- Borrowers get one deep pool of lenders instead of waiting for a single person to take their deal.
- The protocol matches the two automatically, so no one watches an order book.

Gage runs no vaults of its own. All lending liquidity comes through partner managers, who are rewarded for bringing it.

## For vault managers

### Build a strategy

A manager creates a vault in one step and defines what it lends against:

- A universe: real-world assets (tokenized stocks and commodities) or the Robinhood ecosystem (meme coins and utility coins). A vault serves one universe, so its depositors know what they are exposed to.
- The tokens it accepts, chosen from those gage has admitted, and how the vault spreads across its categories.
- How much it puts into any one loan, so no single borrower dominates the vault.
- The longest loan it makes (7 or 21 days).
- A quality bar: the lowest Loan grade it accepts. Every listing is graded A to F against a model of what that loan should cost, so a manager can decide to fund only loans that pay close to or above fair value.

Some choices are commitments made at creation, such as the universe, the fee and the longest term. Depositors can rely on them for the life of the vault. Other settings can be tightened or adjusted over time within those commitments, and changes apply to new loans only.

### Earn

- The manager sets a performance fee between 5% and 15% when creating the vault.
- The fee is earned only on loans that are repaid. When a loan goes wrong, the manager earns nothing on it, so the manager wins when depositors win.
- A share of every manager fee goes to the protocol.

### Compete

Many vaults can fit the same listing. Managers decide how they compete:

- Speed or margin. A manager chooses how much of a loan's return it is willing to share with the protocol's execution to be served sooner. Sharing more wins more loans; sharing less keeps more for depositors and waits its turn.
- Selectivity. A higher quality bar takes fewer loans, each closer to fair value. A wider mandate takes more of the flow.
- Specialisation. A narrow vault can own one market; a broad one can follow the whole universe.

### Stay liquid

A manager can sell a running loan position before it ends, and other vaults can buy it. Sellers turn a position back into cash early; buyers fill up with loans that are already running, at a price that leaves them a margin they chose. Positions can be bought by one vault or shared among several at once.

### See what is happening

- For every open listing, the vault shows whether it took it and, if not, why: outside its tokens, below its quality bar, over its size limits, or out of free cash.
- A manager can check any listing before it is funded and see what each party would receive.
- Alerts report fundings, repayments, write-offs and changes to the vault.

### What a manager can never do

- Hold or move depositors' USDG. The vault only ever pays a manager fees already earned.
- Pick listings by hand. The vault's rules decide what it takes.
- Block, delay or charge withdrawals.
- Lend to themselves.
- Widen the vault beyond the commitments depositors signed up to.

### Access

Creation opens in two stages: first to partners gage admits, then to anyone. Once open, anyone who sees an underserved market can create the vault that serves it.

## For depositors

- Choose a vault by its rules, its manager and its record, and deposit USDG. There is no deposit cap.
- Your share grows as the vault's loans earn, day by day over each loan's term.
- Withdraw whenever the vault has free cash. There is no queue, no waiting period and no withdrawal, deposit or management fee.
- Loans also earn sGAGE loan rewards, shared between a vault's depositors.
- If a loan is not repaid, the vault holds the collateral instead, and the depositors at that moment share it.
- A manager can pause new deposits and new loans, but never withdrawals.
- No return is promised. It depends on which listings fit the vault's rules, whether borrowers repay, and fees.

## For borrowers

- List tokens with a fixed cost and a term, and receive USDG once the loan is funded.
- A listing is funded whole, in one step, by one vault or several together. There is no partial loan to wait on.
- The borrower pays nothing extra for being matched with vaults: the cost of matching comes out of what the loan earns its lenders.
- The suggested cost shown when listing comes from the same model vaults grade against. The closer a listing's cost is to it, the more vaults it suits.
- If a listing waits, the reason is visible, so it can be repriced or resized.
- Repay any time before expiry to take the collateral back, or walk away and keep the USDG. The right to reclaim can also be sold.
- Borrowers earn sGAGE loan rewards on their loans.

## How it fits together

1. Borrowers bring demand.
2. Managers turn judgement into vaults that meet it.
3. Depositors bring the USDG, choosing the managers they trust.
4. The protocol matches listings to vaults automatically and funds them in one step.
5. Repaid loans pay depositors and managers. Protocol fees go to the liquidity of the GAGE/sGAGE pool.
6. Vaults trade positions among themselves, so capital keeps moving.
7. Any market no vault serves is an opening for a new manager.

## Principles

- Managers never have custody of depositors' funds.
- A vault's commitments cannot be loosened after creation.
- Withdrawals never depend on the manager.
- Borrowers' terms never change after listing.
- There are no liquidations: collateral is only ever reclaimed by the borrower or kept by the lenders at expiry.

## Limits

- A listing that fits no vault is not funded until a vault that wants it exists.
- A vault that fits a listing is not guaranteed to get it.
- Recovered collateral is a token, and its market value can be more or less than the loan it secured.